U.S. Tries to Reintegrate Taliban Soldiers

MIAN POSHTEH, Afghanistan — The young Taliban prisoner was led blindfolded to a sweltering military tent, seated among 17 village elders and then, eyes uncovered, faced a chief accuser brandishing a document with the elders’ signatures or thumbprints.

Capt. Scott A. Cuomo, a United States Marine commander who was acting as the prosecutor, told the prisoner: “This letter right here is a sworn pledge from all of your elders that they’re vouching for you and that you will never support the Taliban or fight for the Taliban ever again.”

After a half-hour “trial,” the captain rendered the group’s judgment on the silent prisoner, Juma Khan, 23, whom the Marines had seized after finding a bomb trigger device, ammunition and opium buried in his yard. Mr. Khan’s father and grandfather, who was one of the elders, were among the group. “So on behalf of peace, your family, your grandfather,” Captain Cuomo solemnly said, “we’re going to let you go.”

Thus was justice dispensed on a recent Saturday evening, deep in the Taliban heartland of the Helmand River Valley, where the theory behind the American effort to “reintegrate” the enemy meets the ambiguous reality of a nearly decade-old war.

Captain Cuomo, a 32-year-old Annapolis graduate from Long Island who is not related to the New York political family, acknowledged the hazards of the trial and others like it unfolding in Afghanistan. “Do I know that Juma Khan is not going to turn back around and be the Taliban?” he said. “No.” Nonetheless the effort is proceeding.

Even as Washington and Kabul debate their plans to reconcile with senior members of the Taliban, military commanders on the ground in Afghanistan are reintegrating insurgent foot soldiers on their own. The reason is simple, Captain Cuomo said: While Marines are “trained to fight, and we don’t mind fighting, the problem with fighting is that it doesn’t bring stability to your home.”

Six days after Mr. Khan’s May 1 release, another Marine commander, Capt. Jason C. Brezler, got pledges from 25 former insurgents to sign up as police recruits in the northern Helmand village of Soorkano. A week later in Marja, where clashes between the Marines and the Taliban continue in the wake of an American offensive there in February, Lt. Col. Brian Christmas released two young men who admitted to fighting for the Taliban, after the pair and two elders signed pledges promising the men would not fight again.

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Capt. Scott A. Cuomo, lower right, of the United States Marines met with elders of an Afghan village to determine the fate of a Taliban member, Juma Khan.Credit
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Acting under military guidelines aimed at persuading low-level fighters to lay down their arms, commanders repeat the mantra that the United States will never kill its way to victory in Afghanistan. They say that in a counterinsurgency war intended to winover the population, reintegration is crucial because the Taliban are woven so deeply into the social fabric of the country.

“I can understand why they’re Taliban,” Captain Cuomo said in an interview after Mr. Khan’s release. “Well of course they are, what do you want them to do? I want to do anything, I had to be part of the Taliban, man.”

Military officials describe reintegration so far as sporadic at best, an interim effort ahead of a more formal process that they hope the Afghan government will adopt at a political summit meeting in Kabul in coming weeks.

Last year, as part of an earlier Afghan push to give jobs to defecting Taliban, the Kabul government said that at least 9,000 insurgents had turned in their weapons. Maj. Gen. Richard Barrons, a British Army commander in Kabul who has helped oversee the reconciliation effort, said the Afghan government now estimated that there were 40,000 fighters to be brought back into the fold, with the 1,000 at the top, including the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, as the most important. United States military officials say they do not have a clear idea of how many Taliban have reintegrated so far, including any who came into the fold during the early years of the war, but that the numbers are small.

Washington has so far endorsed Afghan plans for reconciliation with some Taliban, but has drawn the line at negotiating with Mullah Omar. (Washington and Kabul use the term reconciliation for the Taliban leadership and reintegration for the foot soldiers.) Either way, the plans echo the Awakening movement in Iraq, where tribal leaders from the country’s Sunni minority rebelled against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and joined forces with the Americans. But there are many differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, not least Afghanistan’s long history of fighters changing sides, sometimes more than once.

The seeds of Mr. Khan’s “trial” were planted last summer, when the Marines pushed into the lush hamlet of Mian Poshteh, part of an initial escalation ordered in the spring of 2009 by President Obama. Surrounded by harvested poppy fields and a network of irrigation canals, members of Company E of the Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment met fierce Taliban resistance. (The episode was captured in “Obama’s War,” a PBS Frontline documentary broadcast last fall which opened with the shooting death last July of a 20-year-old corporal in the Mian Poshteh market.)

Captain Cuomo’s Company F of the Second Battalion, Second Marine Regiment arrived in October to continuing fighting and the deaths, by sniper and roadside bomb, of two more Marines. But by early this year, the Taliban had either been killed, chased away or given jobs. The Marines reopened the market, committed hundreds of thousands of dollars to work programs and began plans to build a school and clinic.

The 270 Marines of Company F spread out over a sliver of land, 11 miles long by 5 miles wide, encompassing a string of villages along the Helmand River. From spartan bases, some consisting of only a dozen Marines sleeping in the dirt alongside an armored truck, the Americans moved to build relationships among the Pashtun tribes in the area.

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The Taliban prisoner was released in Mian Poshteh.Credit
The New York Times

The same Marines patrolled in the same villages each day, getting to recognize the residents. They awarded the elders construction projects and over hours of tea drinking showed them photographs they had taken of virtually every grown male in their battle space.

“Is this guy Taliban?” the Marines asked repeatedly, then poured what they learned into a computer database. Captain Cuomo, who had spent a day with a Los Angeles Police Department countergang unit between two tours in Iraq and his deployment to Afghanistan, called the process “kind of like C.S.I.,” the CBS crime drama television series.

By April, a villager tipped the Marines off about Mr. Khan, who had recently come back to Mian Poshteh from Pakistan. The Marines raided his house, found the ammunition, trigger device and enough opium, Captain Cuomo said, to fill a large American garbage can. They took him to one of their bases, put him in a holding pen the size of a large dog cage, questioned him for two days, got four sworn statements from local residents that he was a member of the Taliban, then held the trial — the 11th such reintegration that Captain Cuomo has conducted since January.

When it was all over, as the elders and Marines crowded around, Mr. Khan said through a military interpreter that he was relieved to be let go. “I think it’s a very, very good thing,” he said. He said he joined the Taliban because “everybody was like with the Taliban, so it’s like the force of the Taliban, I was under pressure.” He claimed he had never made or placed a homemade bomb for the insurgents.

Two days later, Mr. Khan went on Captain Cuomo’s instructions to the nearby Garmsir District center, where he and some of the elders met with the district governor and Mr. Khan formally declared his loyalty to the Afghan government.

But what is preventing him from rejoining the Taliban? The Marines say the village elders who vouched for him will help keep him in check, as will a parole-like program. The Marines will meet with him regularly and pump him for information about his friends. They also expect him to be employed in a canal cleanup project this summer.

“If they realize at some point that the cause they think they’re fighting for is not a worthy one, and we’re here to bring stability to the area, then you have to make an overture,” Captain Cuomo said, then paused before asking: “Will it bite you in the butt?”

A version of this article appears in print on May 24, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Tries Luring Foot Soldiers From Taliban Back to Society. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe